Wilson, C. Murphy, J. et al. (2009) From Local to Global: A Bird's Eye View of Changing Landscapes. The American Biology Teacher. 71(7). 412-417.
This article was written to provide an inquiry based learning activity for biodiversity lessons. This activity is structured in a way such that the students are introduced at a local level and scaffolded into thinking at a global level. The activity uses GoogleEarth to allow the students to “fly” around the world and observe changes in land over time via satellite images. The first suggested class introduces biodiversity and allows the students to see changes in land where they live. Here, the students make inferences about the causes of landscape change and discuss the potential impacts of landscape change on associated plant and animal communities. The following class takes students to an area that they are familiar with, however they have never been there. Students make the same observations and inferences at this location. The following classes allow the students to go around the world, to unknown regions, where they can observe biodiversity throughout the years. After students have completed this, they present to the class by “flying” them around the world to the chosen reason and describing What landscape changes they you noticed, how these changes affect communities of plants and animals in this area, and how scientists and government officials could use the information they have compiled.
This article presents an activity that begins with a structured inquiry-based activity, goes into a guided inquiry, and ends with a student-directed inquiry. What is even better about this activity, is it allows students to go further into a student-research inquiry-based learning activity. This article not only suggests an inquiry activity, but it provides a very good model to use for other inquiry lessons. It also provides a good foundation to build off of and alter for different lessons. What is also great about the activity that this article describes is that it begins by activating some prior knowledge and connects the lesson to something that the students are familiar with and can relate to. It then scaffolds from this concrete idea to a more and more abstract thinking skill.
I feel that this activity is very possible to replicate in a classroom. It also shows that inquiry lessons do not need to be extremely complicated to provide students the opportunity to participate in student research inquiry. This article gave me a very concrete idea of how to create and utilize an inquiry classroom for my own teaching experiences.
This article was written to provide an inquiry based learning activity for biodiversity lessons. This activity is structured in a way such that the students are introduced at a local level and scaffolded into thinking at a global level. The activity uses GoogleEarth to allow the students to “fly” around the world and observe changes in land over time via satellite images. The first suggested class introduces biodiversity and allows the students to see changes in land where they live. Here, the students make inferences about the causes of landscape change and discuss the potential impacts of landscape change on associated plant and animal communities. The following class takes students to an area that they are familiar with, however they have never been there. Students make the same observations and inferences at this location. The following classes allow the students to go around the world, to unknown regions, where they can observe biodiversity throughout the years. After students have completed this, they present to the class by “flying” them around the world to the chosen reason and describing What landscape changes they you noticed, how these changes affect communities of plants and animals in this area, and how scientists and government officials could use the information they have compiled.
This article presents an activity that begins with a structured inquiry-based activity, goes into a guided inquiry, and ends with a student-directed inquiry. What is even better about this activity, is it allows students to go further into a student-research inquiry-based learning activity. This article not only suggests an inquiry activity, but it provides a very good model to use for other inquiry lessons. It also provides a good foundation to build off of and alter for different lessons. What is also great about the activity that this article describes is that it begins by activating some prior knowledge and connects the lesson to something that the students are familiar with and can relate to. It then scaffolds from this concrete idea to a more and more abstract thinking skill.
I feel that this activity is very possible to replicate in a classroom. It also shows that inquiry lessons do not need to be extremely complicated to provide students the opportunity to participate in student research inquiry. This article gave me a very concrete idea of how to create and utilize an inquiry classroom for my own teaching experiences.
From Local to Global